Motherhood Monthly: The Child Care Conundrum

Editors note: in order to consolidate my thoughts on motherhood/the parenting experience, I'm starting a new monthly column called "Motherhood Monthly," and today's post is obviously the first installment of this column. I'll use this column as a place to discuss what's happening in my world as a mama each month, so that those interested can easily find this topic and those not so interested can easily skip these posts. Enjoy! Or not ;) 

Before we had Charlie Mae, I thought that I had everything figured out when it came to child care.

People would ask me about my plans for working after she was born, and I would respond confidently with something like, "Oh, well I'm really lucky because I work for myself and I work from home, so we're just going to have someone come to the house a few times a week to take care of her while I work. In fact, we've already hired someone!" And then I would probably smile smugly and go on about my day. 

Ha! What a naive, silly little know-it-all I was. I thought I had such a good situation and everything would simply go as planned when the timing was right. Ha! I couldn't have been more wrong.

Because what I've learned in the past 7 months of trying to "work from home" with a baby is this: there is NO easy answer to the child care question that every parent faces at one point or another.

If you cannot be with your child all day every day (and many of us cannot--or make the choice that staying at home with our children isn't the best option for our families), then you will be faced with choosing between a bunch of different child care options. And when you have to make this tough choice, all of the options will feel wrong because they will all mean that someone else is taking care of your child while you work.

Also, it will be really hard to know how you feel/how your child feels about any one option until you try it out. And worst of all, at the end of the day, no matter which child care option you choose, you'll still have 10,000 emotions and worries and anxieties surrounding that choice and whether or not it is the right one.

At least, that's how it's been in my experience. 

Without going on and on about our child care journey [which has been a bit of a nightmare, to be honest], here's a summary of what we've been through over the past 7 months:

We started out with very part-time child care in our home when Charlie Mae was about 13 weeks old. The idea was that we would slowly build up to about 15-20 hours of in-home child care per week. But as soon as our child care provider started, Charlie Mae proceeded to cry almost the ENTIRE time that she was at the house. Every time she came over. Whether or not I was home.

She would cry the second she got a glimpse at the person who took care of her--and not just small tears or protest cries, but the BIG, red-faced, I-can't-breathe kind of crying that made me cry, too. It was horrible. 

But even though it was horrible, we tried to stick it out in the hopes that it would get better as she got older and more used to the person taking care of her. We actually went through 3 different people over the course of 3.5 months; after one person wouldn't work out for various reasons (scheduling, life change, not the right fit, etc.), we would try someone else, praying that this time, it would work and Charlie Mae would warm up to the new person...but it just wasn't working. 

When our third person got a full-time job and gave her notice back in February, we decided that it was time to switch gears. I had been trying to work from home, from the library, from the unappealing Dunkin' Donuts down the street (so I wouldn't be too far away when I inevitably had to come home and feed my non-bottle-taking baby after a few hours), and had been getting VERY little work done for months because of how challenging it was.

Much of the time that we paid someone to come watch Charlie Mae, I ended up coming out to help them multiple times over the course of their time here, or sending them home and paying them anyway because she was crying so much and I couldn't handle it anymore, or because they couldn't get her to sleep and I needed her to nap. Like I said, it wasn't working. 

Even when I left to go work elsewhere, I would get texts after only an hour saying she'd been crying the whole time and could I come home and try feeding her? Not. Working. 

So, when we finally decided to switch gears, we decided to try the in-home day care route. We hoped that if we could find a part-time day care situation, Charlie Mae might be distracted enough by the other kids and by being away from our house/me/my smell that she would be able to handle it (and thus, I would be able to handle it). Having her in the house while I worked no longer felt as easy breezy as it once did, back when I was barefoot, pregnant, and fancy free (!!), and we felt that getting her out of the house was the next viable option. 

And guess what? It seems we were right. It only took us 7 months to figure it out. Charlie Mae has now been going to a lovely in-home day care  for 3 weeks and she is LOVING it. She has only gone twice per week for 2-3 hour chunks at a time so far, and while she isn't really napping or eating there yet, she also isn't crying there [at all!] and could care less when I leave her. She's like, "Peace out mom, I'm gonna go play with my favorite musical toys and new friends and I'll smell ya' later." It's pretty much the best. 

But again, it took 7 months to get here and it's not totally solved yet, either. That being said, I'm hopeful. For the first time since she was born, I see a time in the future where child care isn't a total nightmare and I don't dread the days that someone else is taking care of her. That's got to count for something, right? ;) 

Sometimes I've thought that it would be easier if my situation weren't so flexible--if I'd had to have full-time child care starting at a certain time and we'd all gotten used to it earlier because we had no other choice, or if I'd just decided to stop working to become a full-time mom--but I know that both of these situations are *just* as hard, if not harder, and that I'm kidding myself by thinking there is an "easier" route. There's not. 

Because it's all hard. Being a parent is hard. Period. The child care part is hard, the sleep part is hard (OMG is it hard!), the feeding part is hard, and the emotional part is hard. I love it SO much, but it sure is a challenge. 

So, suffice it to say, parents: I feel ya. This is hard stuff and you are not the only one crying in your car or office because you know that your child is crying wherever he/she is right now and you wish he/she could just be with you.

In these 7 months of being a mom I've learned that the world of parenting has way more tears in it than my old one did (on my part and on my baby's part), but I wouldn't trade those buckets of tears for anything. Well, maybe a full night's sleep, but that's another story...

Thanks for being on this journey with me! Here's to more productivity and less tears for all.